International symposium on Guava and other Myrtaceae : abstracts

It is a pleasure to welcome you to the 2" International Symposium on Guava and Other Myrtaceae. In December 2005 the Central Institute of Subtropial Horticulture (CISH) organized the lst International Symposium on Guava in Lucknow (India) and it was then proposed to include Myrtaceae other than guava in this second symposium. The GUAVAMAP project ("Improvement of Guava: Linkage mapping and QTL analysis as a basis for marker-assisted selection"), a multinational project funded by the European Commission under the INCO-DEV-2 program with participating institutions from Brazil, Venezuela, México, Cuba, France, Spain, and Germany, had just started its work at the end of 2005 and volunteered to organize together with the support of the International Society for Horticultural Scienc (ISHS) the second symposium in México. The Centro de Investigación Científica de Yucatán (CICY) in Mérida and the INIFAP-Campo Experimental Pabellón at Aguascalientes (cióse to the main guava production región in México) share the local organization with the symposium in Mérida being devoted to the application of biotechnologies to Myrtaceae, while the Aguascalientes symposium focuses on production and processing with emphasis on guava. Furthermore and according to the mándate of the GUAVAMAP project, the Mérida symposium is followed by 2 practical courses at the CICY, one in biotechnology on the application of DNA markers in the analysis of tropical fruit trees, and a second one in bioinformatics. In consequence, from its structure this is not the usual international symposium, but a composite event with different activities and at two different locations in México. We hope, however, that this unusual structure did not contribute to too much confusión with the participants and that all of you profit from this meeting and from the interaction with colleagues from different parts of the world.